The start of summer is an ideal time to clean out from past semesters and projects, and what better place to start than your office, your computer, and your digital files. Below are tips for cleaning out a variety of IT-related data.
- Clean your computer area. See instructions for cleaning computer keyboard and mouse surfaces. To clean monitors, blow dust off the screen first. Spray iKlear screen solution or water on a microfiber cleaning cloth for monitors and wipe with horizontal strokes, followed by wiping around the edges. Keep the cloth as dry as possible to prevent moisture marks.
- Clean out your paper files.
a. Recycle non-security paper through K-State Recycling.
b. For confidential or security-related papers, see Sanitizing Paper Storage Media. - Dispose of hard drives or tapes securely by call the Recycling Center at 785-532-6446 to schedule pick-up, or arrange a time to deliver them to the Recycling Center. (See New device simplifies secure disposal of computer hard drives, tapes and also Sanitizing Removable Storage Media.)
- Recycle your K-State Online course. See Reuse your course for fall semester.
- Clean up webpages you maintain. Use w3schools.com’s free Web Page Validation tool to validate webpage HTML, CSS, XML, etc. for broken links, correct code, and more.
- Delete digital files you no longer need. Make sure you don’t have files on your computer with confidential data like Social Security numbers, account numbers, student FERPA information, etc.
- Back up digital files you want to keep, on external hard drives and/or free online storage spaces like Dropbox and the Zimbra Briefcase. See basic IT security practices for backing up files (#10). Also see recent IT articles on the free Dropbox tool and free file storage in the “Briefcase” in K-State Zimbra webmail.
